Chilling the dough

The last article covered the mixing of the dry and wet cookie ingredients to make the dough, and now you would probably think it's time to ball up the batter, put it on the cookie sheet and bake them.

Any cookie dough with a lot of butter, like chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, peanut butter cookies, etc. benefit with a stay in the refrigerator. Try this with dough's based on flour, sugars, butter, and egg, or ones with strong flavors. This will give the batter more body and your cookies more rise; and they will taste better too.

Refrigerating the dough after you make it gives the flour a chance to hydrate and absorb some of the moisture, which improves the texture and appearance of the cookies. To really improve flavor, you'll need to rest the dough overnight. Giving your dough an extended rest and chill allows the ingredients to fully combine and that helps create beautifully browned cookies with more pronounced caramel notes.

The difference starts with the liquid in the egg which hydrates the starch in flour. Giving the flour more time to absorb that liquid makes the dough firmer, but it also lets enzymes in the flour and the egg yolk break down carbohydrates into the simple sugars fructose and glucose. Separately, they taste sweeter and they caramelize faster when baked.

In addition, the sugar in the dough gradually absorbs liquid. If you bake the dough immediately, before sugar has a chance to absorb much liquid, that liquid remains "free" in the dough, and promotes spread. When you refrigerate your cookie dough, it gets a lot firmer and drier, preventing the cookies from spreading on the cookie sheet. Also, as the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat; and the longer the fat remains solid, the less likely the cookies will spread.

Now let's put what we have learned into a great Chocolate Chunk Cookie.